Re: Patent clauses in licenses
Thomas Hood wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 00:30:13 +0200, Glenn Maynard wrote:
>> I don't believe that enforcing software patents is a legitimate "legal
>> right" that needs to be protected.
>
>
> It is fine that you think that people who sue for patent infringement are
> naughty, but it is also irrelevant. Debian is not in the business of
> imposing ethical behavior on its users.
>
> To be consistent with its principles, Debian should not be distributing
> software whose license requires the user to give up rights that she would
> have had, had she not accepted the software from Debian. If someone L
> would normally have the right to sue someone else A then we should not put
> L in the position where she might discover, to her surprise and dismay,
> that she can't sue A after all because she makes use of software that
> Debian provided to her that originally came from A.
Consider the case of work W produced by A, licensed with a narrow
patent-termination clause (terminates on claims that W infringes patents).
Normally L can sue A for patent infringement. However, if L accepts work
W... then L can still sue A for patent infringement related to anything
else. If L sues claiming that W infringes her patents, then L loses her
license to W. (But would L really want to use W, a work which that
irresponsible A made in violation of her patents?)
> The restrictions in the GPL are of a different kind. They limit what the
> licensee can do _with_the_program_.
Again, the narrow restrction is a restriction on what the licensee can do
_with_the_program_. (Viz., the licensee cannot attack the program's
freeness by claiming in a court that it infringes patents.)
Had she not received the program, I suppose she could have sued over it --
but how could she have known that it infringed her patents?
> (Viz., the licensee cannot
> redistribute the program without providing source code, etc.) These are
> not restrictions on what the licensee could have done had she not received
> the program. We have to keep this distinction in mind, I think.
Certainly. :-)
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